The University of California has been no stranger to labor strife. But this week, one of its largest unions shifted its focus from wages to Washington, suing the Trump administration over “extortion.”
On Tuesday, University Professional and Technical Employees (UPTE-CWA 9119), which represents 20,000 healthcare, technical, and research workers across the UC system, announced that it is joining a coalition of labor unions in filing a lawsuit against the Trump administration. The lawsuit, filed in the Northern District of California, challenges the administration’s threat to withhold nearly $17 billion in federal funding unless UC complies with a set of demands that labor leaders describe as unconstitutional.
The Trump administration’s demands include granting government access to student and staff data, cooperating with immigration enforcement in UC hospitals, releasing admissions and hiring information, restricting gender-affirming care for minors, and limiting restroom and locker room access based on sex assigned at birth. Labor leaders argue such conditions are both unlawful and corrosive to UC’s mission as a public institution.
“This is extortion, plain and simple,” said Dan Russell, UPTE president and chief negotiator. “Capitulation would come at a dire cost to workers and communities across the state now and for decades to come as life-saving healthcare is delayed, cutting-edge research is shuttered, and the promise of a world-class education becomes less and less attainable for our students.”
For UC Santa Barbara, where researchers depend on federal dollars to run labs and fund staff positions, the threatened cuts are part of a broader climate of uncertainty. Russell told the Santa Barbara Independent that while “there have not been significant budget cuts at this point,” the risk of rescinded grants is high. “We are trying to make sure we protect all the campuses from any future impacts of the administration’s actions,” he said.
Russell said the coalition of unions — which includes the UC Faculty Association at UCSB — acted in part because UC leadership has been slow to respond. “When we saw the Trump administration starting this shakedown, it did not seem that the university leadership was going to be working with us or handling this in a transparent way,” he said. “We decided that we needed to take action on our own to protect our students and our patients and our research.”
That tension is not new. This spring, dozens of UCSB workers joined a systemwide strike led by UPTE and AFSCME Local 3299, protesting what they called unfair bargaining practices by the university. It was the third major UC labor action in four months. The difference now, Russell emphasized, is that workers and the university have a shared interest in resisting federal overreach.
“I think what the UC community is hoping to see from UC leadership is frontline workers and the UC leadership being able to work together to confront this threat from the Trump administration,” he said.
The lawsuit marks the most recent escalation in a series of conflicts between higher education and federal politics. For UCSB’s students and frontline workers, the outcome may help determine the future of grant funding, as well as the research and education that goes on at these universities.
